Mr. Moto is a fictional Japanese secret agent created by the American author John P. Marquand.
Marquand initially created the character for the Saturday Evening Post, which was seeking stories with an Asian hero after the death of Charlie Chan's creator Earl Derr Biggers.
Though Mr. Moto is shrewd, tough and ruthless against his enemies, to most people in most situations he appears to be a harmless eccentric who sometimes calls himself stupid.
In the final novel, set in the 1950s inside Japan, he is a senior intelligence official in the pro-Western Japanese government.
On occasion his sartorial style is somewhat misguided such as in Mr. Moto Is So Sorry when he appears in black-and-white checked sports clothes with green and red golf stockings.
[citation needed] In the prewar novels, Moto speaks a faintly comic English, with elaborate 'Oriental'-style politeness, with misuse of the definite and indefinite articles.
[citation needed] In Stopover: Tokyo, the final novel, he works directly with U.S. intelligence agents and speaks to them in perfect English.
The novels generally involve a romance between the main character (often a disenfranchised expatriate American) and a mysterious woman.
He believes in the manifest destiny of the Japanese expansion into China, but unlike the military, wants to achieve this slowly and carefully.
Millicent Bell in her biography of John P. Marquand notes how this may have influenced the audience: There is political significance, too, in the calculated appeal to American readers of the ever resourceful Mr. Moto, the representative of Eastern subtlety combined with Western efficiency, who emerges as a gentleman of wit and charm.
Unlike in the novels, Moto is the central character, a detective with Interpol, wears glasses (and has no gold teeth), and is a devout Buddhist (and friendly with the Chinese monarchy).
In early 1938, there was some press talk that Moto would be turned into a Korean due to controversy over Japanese foreign policy, but this did not happen.
In the first film, Think Fast, Mr. Moto, he reveals that he is the managing director of the Dai Nippon Trading Company and had decided to investigate the smuggling activities that were harming his business.
Besides his cat, the women in his life include Lela Liu (played by Lotus Long in the film Think Fast, Mr. Moto), a hotel telephone operator whom he asks out on a date, and who proves to be an agent who helps him in his investigation.
Like his literary counterpart, Kentaro Moto believes that a "Beautiful girl is only confusing to a man",[9] but has been known to use a woman's emotions to aid his cause.
After putting the tipsy Bob Hitchings to bed, he sadly shakes his head and says, "Strange people these Americans.
This is similar to the Maruno uchini mitsuhikiryō (丸の内に三引両),[11] the mon of the Sakuma clan who served under Oda Nobunaga.
In 1965 Mr. Moto's character was revived in a low-budget Robert Lippert production filmed in England starring Henry Silva.
The very tall Silva conveyed an almost James Bond-like playboy character; in the fight scenes it is clearly obvious that he is not proficient in martial arts.
In 1984 Mr. Moto's character was rudely referred to in The Karate Kid by a drunken racist played by Larry Drake.
From May to October 1951, the NBC Radio Network produced and aired 23 half-hour episodes starring James Monks as Mr. I.A.
[16] The show focused on Mr. Moto's fight against Communism although occasionally he solved more mundane mysteries such as murder and blackmail.
[18] The slangy and whimsical song "Java Jive", a 1940 song by Milton Drake and Ben Oakland that was a standard for the Ink Spots, namechecks the detective in a nonsensical couplet: "I love java, sweet and hot / Whoops Mister Moto, I'm a coffee pot".